This understanding of race and racialization is unduly dependent on physical cues. While the visual dimension does indeed inspire racialization, I found Muslim American experience it even when they are racially visible as white. Therefore, for me to use the concept of racialization to understand how Muslim bodies acquire racial meanings, I provide a newer, updated definition of the term employing other factors that allow for bodies to be understood as racial. I define it as “the process by which bodies become racial in their lived realities because of biological and/or cultural traits as a result of the intersection and cooperation between ideologies, policies, laws, and social interactions that results in the denial of equal treatment in society.” This definition allows scholars to examine racialization as interactional—between societal institutions and individuals.

DEFINE: Provides an updated definition of racialization as incorporating cultural traits alongside biological ones, allowing racial meaning to attach even to bodies seen as white. XREF: Challenges phenotype-centered theories of race; connects to scholarship on racialization in Muslim American studies and implicit bias work.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 68